@ 14:48 UTCmember

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

It feels like time is flying. Already week 7 over, again with 6 snapshots released since my last review (0208, 0209, 0210, 0212, 0213, 0214). Some users are still reporting about issues with corrupt Mesa/Qt shadar caches, but it is currently not entirely clear if all those users had the fixed Qt/Mesa packages on their machine, and non-corrupt caches, before doing further update. If you’re affected by this issue, please record in a log when you remove caches, what versions Qt/Mesa you had (and from what repo) and what updates you got, in case you run again into corruptions. I’m sure the responsible developers will be able to correlate issues much better like this.

As for the 6 snapshots, they delivered those updates:

RPM 4.14.1

Freetype 2.9

Linux kernel 4.15.2 & 4.15.3

Mono 5.8.0

KDE Applications 17.12.2

NetworkManager 1.10.4

Firewalld 0.5.1

Liberation2 fonts (a fork / rework of liberation fonts) was removed.

VLC 3.0

And there are of course things coming your way in the next few days/weeks, some with more, some with less impact, as usual:

GLibc 2.27, without sunrpc support

KDE Frameworks 5.43.0

Adoption of SPFX-3.0 license strings (so far, SPDX-3.0 is not yet accepted by the various scripts/bots)

Thursday15 February, 2018

@ 21:00 UTCmember

Up in the night, couldn't sleep; idle mail chew &
triage of my TODO, modelling, watched a movie, slept on a chair;
hmm.

Off to Aldeburgh to see B&A, lovely lunch, walk on
the beach with Anne.

Found an interesting chap driving a quad-bike
dragging some instrumentation up the beach - quizzed him. It seems
they place several thousand RFID instrumented drill+fill stones on
the beach - then watch where the sea, storms etc. move them over
time - must be a fascinating data-set of vectors. Helpful to check
that Sizewell doesn't fall into the sea I guess. Found a
paper
with pictures on the topic.

Back for chat, pancakes, and set off home. Odyssey in
the car. Plugged away at a proposal until late.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

@ 12:50 UTC

The streak of six Tumbleweed snapshots continued this a week as openSUSE’s rolling release has provided a consistent release of six snapshots per week this year.

There were hundreds of packages updated this week and sysdig, Freetype and Flatpak were just a few of the many packages to receive an updated version.

At the time of publishing this article, snapshot 20180213 was the most recent snapshot released. Mozilla Firefox 58.0.2 fixed a tab crash during printing. The package yast2-ca-management was dropped with the autoyast2 4.0.31 update. A new set of functions that allows 64-bit offsets even on 32-bit systems are now available with cryptsetup 2.0.1, which is a user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes. Cryptsetup also increased maximum allowed Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF) memory-cost limit to 4 GiB. Another notable package in the snapshot was the update of the Ruby debugger package rubygem-byebug 10.0.0, which added Ruby 2.5.0 support and fixed a remote server crash when interrupting a client.

The anticipated portable font engine freetype 2.9 version was in the 20180210 snapshot. There were a few patches added, and as its a Google Summer of Code project, support was extended for the new Adobe Compact Font Format (CFF) engine to handle Type 1 fonts, which greatly improve the rendering. Controlling and monitoring various aspects of networking in the Linux Kernel with iproute2 4.15.0 were made and the Linux Kernel was updated to 4.15.2, which deleted several patches. The mono-core project sponsored by Microsoft updated to version 5.8.0 and brought new features and changes for WebAssembly and Profiler. Web developers will see a lot of bug fixes with the update to php7 7.2.2. Two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) were fixed with the update to postgresql10 10.2. Vulkan 1.0.68.0 added layer metadata for EXT_validation_cache extension and the VulkanInfo utility now features an html backend and improves information accessibility.

¡GRACIAS!

@ 10:10 UTC

Last week the Ceph Day Germany took place at Deutsche Telekom in Darmstadt. Around 160 people took part in the event and attended the talks of the 13 speakers over the day.

It was a great day with a lot of discussions, feedback and networking for the Germany/European Ceph community. The event ended in a networking reception with drinks and fingerfood, planed for an hour but actually ended after nearly two.

A big thank you to the sponsors (SUSE, SAP, Deutsche Telekom AG, Tallence, Intel, 42on.com, Red Hat and Starline) which made the event possible. The same applies to the speakers and attendees, without you it would have been a meaningless event. A special thank you to Danielle Womboldt from Red Hat for all the organisational help and Leo as the Ceph community manager.

We didn't manage to record all sessions due to technical problems, but the most of them. You can find the videos and slides from the speakers in the agenda of the Ceph day or directly in the following Google Drive folder. We will upload the recordings also to the Ceph YouTube channel later. There is also a subfolder with some impressions of the day.

I'm proud that we hosted the event. If you could not attend or would like to learn more about the community I recommend to attend to the next Ceph Day in London in April 2018. See you next time and at the Cephalocon APAC next month in Beijing.

@ 08:46 UTC

Let the fun begin! This week it was announced that the openSUSE Project is one of the 212 mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code, which is an annual international program that awards stipends to university students to write code and learn about open source development during their summer break.

The openSUSE Project has participated in GSoC since 2006 and has helped more than 50 students get started with free software development.

As a mentoring organization, eligible students will have an opportunity between March 12 – 27 to submit a project proposal to the GSoC program site. The program is open to university students aged 18 or over.

After the students submit their applications, there will be a review period from March 27 to April 23. Accepted projects will be announced on April 23 and the coding will being on May 14 and continue throughout the summer.

@ 19:37 UTCmember

I’m starting a new blog and this is the first post.

I’ll try to write about the things I do in the open source communities I’m involved in (openSUSE, SUSE, KDE, etc.). I also plan to write about other personal projects I work on and about development languages, technology, Linux and Free Software in general.

@ 01:53 UTCmember

More important than the argument of KDE vs Gnome or Qt vs GTK is the kind of frosting you are using on your cakes. I'm completely serious about this; frosting needs to be delicious and any thought about fat content or calories is not part of the argument. Cake, cupcakes and the like are never everyday food so when you do have it, make it delicious and don't use artificial garbage.

I have continued to use Gnome Recipes as my "system of record" to organize my recipes. I have continued a few recipes, the most important one is this cream cheese frosting recipe. I truly have not had a better frosting that goes better with cake, cookies, brownies... even ice cream.

This recipe is even a great base for different directions of flavor. It tastes just as good with adding chocolate chunks, chips or syrup. Turn it into chocolate frosting... although, that can be admittedly a bit rich. This will go great with an angel food with sliced strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. Very versatile.

I still haven't found a work around on the units, perhaps using metric only would work better but it is not even properly calculating to other units. It is really the only one issue this program has.

Navigate here for my initial experience with Gnome Recipes on openSUSE Tumblweed, including installation and usability.

Synchronizing Between Machines

Having the database of recipes on one machine is not very useful on so many levels. Firstly, redundancy is [a] key in data preservation. Secondly, the freedom to add recipes from a different machine than what I am using in the kitchen. Flexibility is very important and maybe someday I will have a 2nd kitchen (not likely) or a more appropriate unit for the kitchen (more likely).

My solution is to use Syncthing as for this purpose it fits my needs the best, as I am already running Syncthing on my machines. You can see more on how to set it up here or here.

Gnome Recipes stores its files under a hidden folder in your home directory, it's full path:

~/.local/share/gnome-recipes

Within the Syncthing-GTK program, you can add this folder as one of your shared folders and add the computer with which you want to share it. Unfortunately when using Syncthing-GTK it uses the default Gnome (GTK) file dialog box and not the KDE Plasma version so you can't navigate to the hidden folder on either machine. You will have to manually type it in or copy and paste the location from a file manger, like Dolphin, or a terminal application. This irritation gives me pause to think, I should probably look at the Qt version of Syncthing to see how that one has developed in the last year.

After setting this up, I am now able to keep synchronized my main machine with my "electronic recipe book" machine, also running openSUSE Tumblweed. The only area of consideration is to …

@ 21:00 UTCmember

@ 20:06 UTCmember

GNOME 3.28 will release with another batch of new wallpapers that only a freaction of you will ever see. Apart from those I also made a few for different purposes that didn’t end up being used, but it would be a shame to keep shelved.

So here’s a bit of isometric goodness I quite enjoy on my desktop, you might as well.

@ 11:00 UTC

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long and waited for more than month, so it's time to process it and include new projects. I hope that gives you have good motivation to spend Christmas break by translating free software.